Google Declares Stephen Colbert As Greatest Living American

It’s official. Stephen Colbert is the Greatest Living American, or at least now ranks tops for that phrase at Google. It’s all come from the latest Google bombing campaign sparked off in part by Stephen himself. The backstory on this, plus the “I thought Google bombing didn’t work anymore” angle, all below.

Jonah Stein from Alchemist Media raised the issue of Google-bombing during the audience Q&A with Mr. Colbert at a taping of his show (out of respect, I use the Mr. honorific. So say we all). What would Mr. Colbert like to rank for?

Giant Brass Balls.

Sure, Jonah thought — but why not also truthiness and most important, Greatest Living American, he wrote at the Alchemist Blog. Search Engine Watch spread the news. SEOmoz spread it further, complete with more detailed instructions and a bribe.

Today, we spotted News.com noting he was now ranking for the term. Congrats, Mr. Colbert. We salute you.

But it’s not that page which is ranking on Google. It’s the home page. And that brings us to the entire wasn’t Google bombing killed thing?

The change Google made back in January was designed to stop pages ranking for terms if a lot of people linked to them using those terms but the pages themselves didn’t use the words. Everyone want to call George W. Bush a miserable failure? His page no longer ranks for that since the page itself doesn’t use those words. OK, so it did just rank again recently, due to the White House using one of them. But the word is gone now – and the page has dropped back down in the rankings.

The Colbert Report’s home page uses NONE of the words (because Stephen, who is modest, has no need to declare himself the greatest).

So what’s the deal? Wasn’t the Google fix supposed to prevent this exact thing?

Yes, actually. Of course, we’ve had a few exceptions cited, such click here ranking things like Adobe and Apple downloads. Maybe Google’s Matt Cutts will come along to shed some more light on the situation. I suspect the answer will be that the link bomb fix Google uses is more sophisticated than just looking to see if the words people are using in links, when a lot of links suddenly point at a page, actually appear on a page.